Tremendous changes have been occurring in the Internet that influence our everyday lives. For example, in today's society, mobile computing devices are becoming increasingly more common. Many mobile computing devices, such as personal digital assistants, cellular phones, and the like, may be employed to communicate voice messages, emails, text messages, and so forth, as well as to search for information over the Internet. It is not uncommon to see a person on a bus, train, or even a boat, to be using their mobile devices to search for merchants, restaurants, music, businesses, or the like.
However, accessing multimedia content, in particular video content, remains cumbersome. For example, while there is an increase in the functionality of mobile phones, including the advent of high speed “third generation” (3G) networks, the vast majority of phones around the world rely upon a set of discrete applications to Find, Use, Save, and Share media. For example, to view mobile video on demand, one must typically launch a mobile web browser or media browser, navigate to the desired video, then select a video for viewing. Typically, this sequence will result in the launching of a media player application which downloads the video and plays the resulting stream, typically encoded using encoding methods such as “3GP,” a variant on the MPEG-4 encoding standard. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GP) Note that this method is also used to initiate audio media as well, such as internet radio stations encoding using 3GP. An example is SomaFM.com, where various streams can be accessed via a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) mobile web page where a link to a 3GP stream may be found. While this does work, it constrains the user to using a mobile phone as if it were a desktop computer, with web or web-like navigation and button pressing required to view media.
Thus, access to media, whether to upload or download, can be cumbersome for users to obtain and/or evaluate. For example, some mobile devices have a limited keypad, a small screen, and/or limited text based message capabilities. Such devices may be more convenient for the user to send relatively short text based messages, such as Short Message Service (SMS) messages, Instant Messaging (IM) messages, Chat, email, or the like. Even with more capable wired or wireless devices, it is typically time-consuming for a user to manually open a browser, navigate to a search service, submit search terms, and navigate forward and backward through the listed search results.